Divine Variations offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference. He argues that, instead of a rupture between religion and modern biology on the question of human origins, modern scientific theories of race are, in fact, an extension of Christian intellectual history.

Keel's study draws on ancient and early modern theological texts and biblical commentaries, works in Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in ethnology and early social science, debates within twentieth-century public health research, and recent genetic analysis of population differences and ancient human DNA. From these sources, Keel demonstrates that Christian ideas about creation, ancestry, and universalism helped form the basis of modern scientific accounts of human diversity—despite the ostensible shift in modern biology towards scientific naturalism, objectivity, and value neutrality. By showing the connections between Christian thought and scientific racial thinking, this book calls into question the notion that science and religion are mutually exclusive intellectual domains and proposes that the advance of modern science did not follow a linear process of secularization.

About the author

Terence Keel is Assistant Professor of History and Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"Divine Variations brilliantly traces the roots of modern racial science to Christian intellectual history and ideology. Despite the efforts of genomic researchers to portray current biological concepts of race as purely scientific, Keel shows that these scientists are secular creationists retelling religious folklore about the origins of human life. This book is a crucial contribution to the history of racial science."

—Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century

"At a moment when some evolutionary theorists have become quasi-theologians, offering universal stories of existence that are as imperialistic as their eighteenth- and nineteenth- century versions, and when popular DNA speculations about racial heritage and legacy have brought us back to the door of eugenics, Keel's book reminds us of the theological trajectories from which these concepts arise. This is not an anti-science text, but one that shows us the interrelationship of theology and science and tacit assumptions behind the scientific will to universalize. We will never be able to defeat racial reasoning so long as it is concealed and nurtured in certain kinds of scientific reasoning. Keel's book greatly aids us in separating the two."

—Willie James Jennings, author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

"The brilliance of Terence Keel's book is to show that when it comes to race, there was no war between science and religion. Instead, this engaging and penetrating study shows how Christian ideas helped create scientific approaches to and explanations of race. Divine Variations is a must-read for all scholars of race, religion, and science."

—Edward J. Blum, co-author of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America

"In this brilliantly argued and fascinating account of the development of scientific racial theory, Keel convincingly demonstrates that the modern biological sciences still bear the deep imprint of their religious origins. Divine Variations offers us insightful new ways of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion."

—Peter Harrison, author of The Territories of Science and Religion

"Terence Keel's book brings needed nuance to the cultural and scientific history of the study of human diversity. He explores the connections between the theology and science of what eventually became human microevolution, and follows the various threads down to the present day. This is an important body of scholarship, with which anyone interested in the scientific origins of human racial theory must engage."

—Jonathan Marks, author of What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People and Their Genes